China’s economic growth is largely predicated on urbanization and the role of the state in modernizing via the development of cities. Since the 1908s China has experienced urban change at an unprecedented scale and scope— by 2050 there will be more than 210 cities in China with more than one million residents.

Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event, because it represents the largest construction project in the planet’s history. In two decades 85% of China’s total population will live in cities. This represents the largest internal migration process in world history, and a nearly exact reversal of 1978 population distribution at the dawn of the post-Mao era.

The pace and scale of change, as well as the grand narrative of urban transformation, are dominated by superlatives— the tallest skyscrapers, the largest shopping malls, the longest bridges and highways, the fastest trains. All this novelty and grandeur serves to underscore to the teleology of progress promoted by President Xi Jinping’s “China dream”— a syllogism that argues for economic prosperity of the country, rejuvenation of the nation and happiness of the people. The ‘China Dream’ is a syllogism, constructed by way of inexorable logic and, as the apotheosis of political rhetoric, only argued symbolically. It has been recently summarized by a three-and-a-half minute video that is projected in every cinema before the screening of any film, since July 1st. This self-aggrandizing video will continue to screen at least until the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, to be held in the autumn.

Behind the glittering façade of this story lie realities of exclusion, violence, dispossession, and destruction which all point toward a civilization’s ruin. Such realities are the focus of Song Pengfei’s debut feature film Underground Fragrance (地下香 dixia xiang), an excellent piece of social realism and minimalist formalism, which depicts the lives of the underdog, the marginalized, the subaltern, those often dismissed as collateral damage for the achievement of the "China dream."

To define the main male character Yong Le (played by Chinese model and debut actor Luo Wenjie) and his female neighbour Xiao Yun (debut actress Ying Ze) as economic migrants would be reductive. Rather, they are part of the shuzu (‘rat tribe’), the estimated one million people who live underground in Beijing. Their homes are subterranean units subdivided from the city's labyrinthine bomb shelters and bunkers built in the 1970s, more closely resembling burial recesses than habitable dwellings.

Playing on the constant shifts between the two registers of the underground (the dixia of the title) and the aboveground, the film masterfully evokes an emotional atmosphere composed of silence, pauses, sighs, and heavy breathing as a result of exertion. This atmosphere, combined with prolonged close-ups on motionless facial expressions, emphasizes non-verbal communication as the governing force of human interactions. Silence is indeed more powerful than a million empty words to portray the particular blend of emotional alienation, disconnection and estrangement that dominates the lives of the ‘rat tribe’. At the same time, it is exactly this silence that brings to the fore the intimate value of ordinary people, who live extraordinary and excruciating experiences of loneliness, sorrow and despair with a profound sense of human dignity.

To borrow E. P. Thompson’s expression, Underground Fragrancethus belongs to a ‘history from below’— a portrait of China’s forgotten dreams: rescuing the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ and juxtaposing the images of the nationalistic ‘China dream’ with the common lives of those whose only dream is to survive and maybe, one day, to move aboveground. In this heterotopic narrative, in which individuals live in the domain of otherness, their only hope can be to resurface from the subterranean rat-like existence and breathe some air.

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Essay by Dr. Maurizio MarinelliAssociate Professor of East Asian HistoryUniversity of Sussex